3–14 Aug 2026
Europe/London timezone
This is the annual bootstrap conference, which will take place in London during the first two weeks of August 2026

A Bootstrap Study of Confinement in AdS

6 Aug 2026, 15:15
30m
Oliver Thompson Lecture Theatre 101 (Tait Building at City St George’s, University of London)

Oliver Thompson Lecture Theatre 101

Tait Building at City St George’s, University of London

Speaker

Stefanos Kousvos

Description

Yang-Mills theory in AdS$_4$ with Dirichlet boundary conditions is expected to undergo a transition as the AdS radius varies, since the boundary data is incompatible with confinement in flat space. Various mechanisms have been proposed for the disappearance of the Dirichlet boundary condition, which we discuss. From the boundary viewpoint, the associated CFT is a deformation of a generalised free theory of non-Abelian conserved currents. We test the various proposed scenarios by deriving non-perturbative constraints from the numerical conformal bootstrap of the four-point function of non-Abelian conserved currents. We rule out the scenario in which the boundary current decouples, and find favourable evidence that the Dirichlet boundary condition disappears via fixed point annihilation.

Presentation materials